Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®)

Rich Release Format Microsoft® Access Load Script

This document is a guide to loading an RRF subset of the UMLS Metathesaurus into an empty Microsoft Access (MS Access®) database by using the scripts and files created by MetamorphoSys. These operations must be performed on a machine running Microsoft Windows operating system with the MS Access database product installed.

To generate the necessary files and scripts, make the following selections when creating a subset with MetamorphoSys:

Select the adjacent “UTF-16LE” option from the “character encoding” pick-list.

The RRF subset of the UMLS Metathesaurus must be less than 2GB total size, as this is the upper limit to MS Access databases.

Configuring and Running the Load Script

Navigate to your output directory using the Windows explorer.

Open the umls.mdb file by double-clicking on it. This file is preloaded with a macro that will load the database.

Select "Modules".

Select the "ImportUMLS" module by double-clicking on it.

Run the "CreateUMLSSchema" macro. If applicable, enable macros (an online search for "MS Access enable macros" can help with this).

Any problems should result in an error being reported.

Ensure the total data set is < 2GB as this is an upper limit on the size of an MS Access database.

umls.mdb is now loaded and ready for use.

Sample Queries

At this point a fully loaded Microsoft® Access database containing a subset of the UMLS Metathesaurus should exist. This Access database comes pre-installed with a variety of queries. These queries should be parameterized, meaning that they can be run with various values for some of the lookup entries.